"We pray that the violence in Egypt will end, and that the rights and
aspirations of the Egyptian people will be realized, and that a better
day will dawn over Egypt," President Barack Obama solemnly intoned at
the beginning of his remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday
morning.

This annual celebration of official righteousness is,
appropriately enough, convened by the Fellowship Foundation, a shadowy,
politically connected group with a long record of organizing "prayer
circles" that bring together foreign dictators, American politicians and
military contractors. Defending the practice, the group's organizer
noted, "the Bible is full of mass murderers."

Obama's prayer
follows a series of White House and State Department statements
"deploring" the violence in Egypt and expressing moral indignation over
the attacks by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak on peaceful
protesters and the media.

Who do they think they are kidding? For
30 years, US administrations, Democratic and Republican alike,
including that of Obama, have backed Mubarak precisely because of his
ability to impose policies supported by Washington against the
overwhelming opposition of the Egyptian people. That this required
systematic and relentless violence was well understood.

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If Obama
is crying crocodile tears now over the violence that has left hundreds
dead and thousands wounded in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and
across Egypt, it is only because this violence has stopped working, and
the Egyptian people continue to resist and struggle.

He wasn't
crying when he delivered his speech in Cairo in June 2009, which
included not a word of criticism of the Mubarak regime. Instead, he
praised the Egyptian dictator as a "stalwart ally" and a "force for
stability and good in the region."

Like his predecessors at the
White House, Obama has sent an estimated $2 billion annually -- second only
to US aid to Israel -- to prop up Mubarak's dictatorship. The vast bulk of
this money has gone to the army and police forces for the purpose of
repressing the people of Egypt and the entire region.

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That the
president and other top US officials were hardly unaware of the violence
carried out daily by the regime has been substantiated by documentary
proof thanks to the secret diplomatic cables from the Cairo embassy
released by WikiLeaks. A cable sent to Washington by the US ambassador
in Cairo just months before Obama's speech noted matter-of-factly that
police brutality in Egypt is "routine and pervasive," with "literally
hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone."

This
was hardly news. The Egyptian government has ruled through a virtually
uninterrupted state of emergency over the course of Mubarak's entire
presidency. This allowed administrative detention without trial, the
criminalization of strikes and the outlawing of any non-sanctioned
gathering of five or more people.

In practice, this has meant
that workers who have dared to strike have been met with riot police and
troops, subjected to mass arrests and beaten with clubs and rifle
butts. Leaders of workers' protests have been hunted down, jailed and
tortured. Those who the regime has bothered bringing to trial have
frequently been hauled before special state security courts supposedly
meant to deal with cases of armed terrorism.

Neither Obama's nor
any other US administration has found these actions troubling. They have
helped create the most profitable conditions for the Egyptian
bourgeoisie and transnational banks and corporations. Certainly no US
official suggested withholding a single cent of US aid over the brutal
repression of the Egyptian workers.

While Washington is now
expressing its indignation over the arrests and intimidation of US and
other foreign journalists covering the events in Egypt, it took no
action against its client Mubarak as his regime arrested, tortured and
"disappeared" journalists over the years, including for such offenses as
"misquoting" his ministers, raising questions about his own health or
writing derogatory reports about his son and chosen successor, Gamal.

The
US viewed with approval the rounding up and detention without charges
of thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist
groups.

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Washington likewise made no issue over the barbaric forms
of torture meted out against thousands upon thousands of political
prisoners, which ranged from burning people on their chest and legs to
attaching electrodes to their tongues, nipples and genitals, to hanging
them upside down to beatings and rapes.

On the contrary, the US
government and its intelligence agencies viewed Mubarak's torturers as a
resource. It is likely that CIA officials watching the televised
coverage of the goon squads attacking the protesters in Tahrir Square
would have recognized some of their ringleaders, having rubbed shoulders
with them in the torture chambers of Cairo's Lazoughli Street secret
police headquarters or Maulhaq al-Mazra prison.

Under an
"extraordinary rendition program" begun under the Clinton administration
in the 1990s, alleged terror suspects abducted by the CIA elsewhere in
the world were flown in hoods and shackles to Egypt for the express
purpose of being interrogated under torture. This grisly arrangement,
which established a seamless unity between the Egyptian torture regime
and US imperialism's intervention in the Middle East, was worked out
between US intelligence and the head of Mubarak's secret police, Omar
Suleiman. Recently named as vice president, Suleiman has been in regular
telephone discussions with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice
President Joe Biden and other US officials.

Bill Van Auken (born 1950) is a politician and activist for the Socialist Equality Party and was a presidential candidate in the U.S. election of 2004, announcing his candidacy on January 27, 2004. His running mate was Jim Lawrence. He came in 15th (more...)